Communication protocols define standardized communication procedures to enable equipment from different vendors to intercommunicate. Communication standards generally evolve constantly as new needs and more powerful electronic technology emerges. Communications circuits may be combined in one or more integrated circuits to achieve desirable price points for consumer electronics. Several communications components including filters, amplifiers, encoders, decoders, signal processing components, error correction components, and memory may be combined or integrated in a single integrated circuit or chip. Specialized chips and/or chip sets may be developed by semiconductor manufacturers to support specific communication protocols. As new communication standards or variations of standards are released, new chips and/or chips sets are designed and released for sale.
Continuous analog signals may be converted to a sequence of discrete digital values by an analog-to-digital converter (ADC). The ADC may represent the value of an analog signal at a specific point in time, which may be referred to as a sample of the analog signal, by a finite number of possible values. To avoid aliasing, an analog signal is often low-pass filtered to substantially eliminate unwanted higher frequencies. The low-pass filtered signal may then be processed or sampled periodically at a frequency that is two times the cut-off frequency of the low-pass filter and the samples converted to a digital value. The resultant digital values may then be processed by a variety of digital components including digital filters, microprocessors, micro controllers, digital signal processors (DSPs), field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), and others.